All-hands meeting - today

Fermilab Director Pier Oddone will hold an all-hands meeting at 10:30 a.m. today to update employees on several important items.

Meeting topics will include:

Changes to insurance premiums

Conclusions from the Employee Advisory Group survey

Current status of Congressional budget process

The program going forward after the Tevatron

If the auditorium is full, overflow seating will be available in One West. The meeting will not be streamed, but a video recording will be made available afterwards.

Special Announcement

New website highlights 28 years of Tevatron innovations

Today, Fermilab launches a new website to tell the story of the Tevatron, the United States’ highest-energy particle accelerator. The Tevatron will shut down on Sept. 30, 2011, after 28 years of discovery and innovation.

The new website includes an interactive timeline of milestones from the Tevatron’s lifetime, a look ahead at how the Tevatron will continue to inform future efforts and experiments, information on the shutdown event and celebration for employees and users and resources for members of the media.

CMS milestone - Sept. 14

Over the course of 16.5 hours ending Wednesday, Sept. 14, the CMS experiment recorded 113.4 inverse picobarns of data, more than three times the 36 inverse picobarns it recorded in all of 2010. The detector's data-taking efficiency was impressively high. CMS recorded almost 97 percent of the 117.4 inverse picobarns of luminosity the LHC accelerator delivered. This occurred just days after a period of machine development and a technical stop, a time during which operators are usually working out the kinks in the updated accelerator. The ramp-up was the machine's fastest yet.

In the News

Free will and quantum clones

From Scientific American, Sept. 19, 2011

The late philosopher Robert Nozick​, talking about the deep question of why there is something rather than nothing, quipped: “Someone who proposes a non-strange answer shows he didn’t understand the question.” So, when Scott Aaronson began a talk three weeks ago by saying it would be “the looniest talk I’ve ever given,” it was a good start. At a conference on the nature of time—a question so deep it’s hard even to formulate as a question—“loony” is high praise indeed. And indeed his talk was rich in ambition and vision. It left physics überblogger Sabine Hossenfelder uncharacteristically lost for words.

Balloon-based experiment to measure Gamma rays

From Space Daily, Sept. 20, 2011

Beginning Sunday, September 18, 2011 at NASA's launch facility in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, space scientists
from the University of New Hampshire will attempt to send a balloon up to 130,000 feet with a one-ton instrument payload to measure gamma rays from the Crab Pulsar, the remains of a supernova explosion that lies 6,500 light years from Earth. The launch is highly dependent on weather and wind conditions, and the launch window closes at the end of next week.

Exploring interactions with space and time

Craig Hogan

Craig Hogan, Director of the Center for Particle Astrophysics, wrote this column.

In the world according to quantum physics, particles move, interact and transform in space and time. Iconically, these processes are represented by Feynman diagrams, where interacting particle states appear as intersecting lines and squiggles.

In a Feynman diagram, spacetime is represented by the paper or blackboard it is written on. Although it belongs to the same physical world as the particles, it is not part of the diagram. That awkward relationship highlights a deep and longstanding ambiguity about the connection of the quantum world with space and time that lies at the heart of some of the deepest mysteries of physics.

Fermilab’s accelerator experiments are close to a realization of the Feynman ideal: they collide particles at enormous energies, and scientists analyze the debris. In these extremely short-lived collisions, spacetime is not a player. It just sits there, a passive stage for the particle action. To probe the behavior of spacetime, we need to conduct experiments where the studied material extends over a much larger volume of space and duration in time, using particles whose interactions extend over very large systems. Our Cosmic Frontier experiments and projects do that in several very different ways, described after the jump.

Fermilab softball champs

ES&H weekly report, Sept. 20

This week's safety report, compiled by the Fermilab ES&H section, includes one incident. It was not recordable. An employee received first-aid treatment after dropping 25 pounds of aluminum on his foot.